Pristine 245-million-year-old fossil reveals internal organs of ancient marine reptile

Two hundred and forty-five million years ago, a small marine reptile no longer than a human arm sank into the sediment of a shallow Triassic sea and, through an extraordinary accident of preservation, kept its organs intact until paleontologists in Yunnan Province, China, uncovered them. The creature, Austronaga minuta, offers science something almost never granted by deep time: a window into the living interior of an ancient predator, revealing the oldest known reptile digestive tract and raising new questions about when evolutionary complexity truly began. In the long story of life rebuildin